Java Performance: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 11. Database Performance Best Practices

This chapter investigates the performance of Java-driven database applications. Applications that access a database are subject to non-Java performance issues: if a database is I/O-bound, or if it is executing SQL queries that require full table scans because an index is missing, no amount of Java tuning or application coding is going to solve the performance issues. When dealing with database technologies, be prepared to learn (from another source) about how to tune and program the database.

This is not to say that the performance of an application that uses a database is insensitive to things under the control of the JVM and the Java technologies that are used. Rather, for good performance it is necessary to ensure that both the database and the application are correctly tuned and executing the best possible code.

Sample Database

The examples in this chapter use a sample database set up to store the data for 128 stock entities for the period of one year. During the year, there are 261 business days.

Prices for the individual stocks are held in a table called STOCKPRICE, which has a primary key of the stock symbol and the date. There are 33,408 rows in that table (128*261).

Each stock has a set of five associated options, which are also priced daily. The STOCKOPTIONPRICE table holds that data with a primary key of the symbol, the date, and an integer representing the option number. There are 167,040 rows in that table (128*261*5).

JDBC ...